Common Core Writer Blows Whistle on Illiteracy Crisis

One of the key people selected to write the Common Core reading standards is now blowing the whistle on the growing Common Core-induced crisis in literacy wreaking havoc across America. In an interview with Liberty Sentinel’s Alex Newman, Dr. Louisa Moats, an internationally renown reading expert, explained that the Common Core’s foundational literacy programs got it wrong. The result: Major, life-long damage being inflicted on American children.

“My warnings and protests were ignored at the time,” said Dr. Moats. “I knew from my prior experience that the way it was written, organized, would undo a lot of the progress that we had made during the previous eight years. And that’s exactly what happened.”

She said she was “not pleased” with Common Core and was shocked that it was rolled out across America without testing. And she was even more appalled when publishers all began aligning their books with it.

“There’s language in Common Core that’s not based in reality, that doesn’t reflect how children learn to read,” she said. “We have decades of data on what it takes for kids to acquire fluency.”

In particular, she slammed the “sight word” method that forces children to memorize whole words as if they were learning to read Chinese. “This is not how a good reader reads,” Dr. Moats explained.

“There is lots of evidence showing this, including studies about what happens in the brain as children learn to read. It is a myth that kids learn irregular words or learn any words ‘by sight.’ They don’t.”

Dr. Moats also spoke out about the growing federal role in dictating education policy and standards to the states. “I seldom see any federally funded initiative that works the way it’s intended,” explained Moats, a leading expert on the science of reading.

“It made me question what is the role of our U.S. Department of Education,” she added. “What it’s doing now is appalling to me.”

Functionally Illiterate

This quackery is exactly why the government’s own data show 2/3 of adults in DC are functionally illiterate and half of California children can’t read. When they can’t read their high-school diploma, they can’t read their Bible, history books, or anything else.

And believe it or not, the “whole word” and “sight word” quackery that was first exposed as quackery in the mid-1800s is now being pushed at the GLOBAL level by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It’s one of the most critical issues of our time.

7 thoughts on “Common Core Writer Blows Whistle on Illiteracy Crisis”

My wife, taught our Tea Party kids and others in our Hendersonville, NC gop the evils of Common Core. It was so bad, that I used the expression Kommie Core when referring to Common Core. We saved Hendersonville. I would have thought that this garbage would have been obliterated by now, fully 10 yrs. since we dealt them a death blow.

Dr. Moats compares “sight word” reading to learning Chinese characters. I’ve heard it proposed that Chinese characters, by reducing the easy flexibility to create new words as in alphabetic literacy, makes it easier for the Chinese Communist Party to keep thinking corralled. By the same token the inflexibility of characters is probably responsible in part for holding back development in China for a thousand years while the West raced from one new technology to another. Even today this is reflected in China’s need to steal around $350 billion annually in intellectual property from the US to maintain its rapid development. All of this is in spite of China being blessed with one of the highest average IQ’s in the world and persons of Chinese ancestry doing marvelously well economically when freed into a Western, alphabetically literate country.

There can be no doubt that at some level US education authorities know all of this, and the “sight word” reading method is being introduced here to intellectually hobble our population in the same way the Chinese have been. This is more than a crime against humanity, it’s a crime against a civilization.

Thanks Tom! Couldn’t agree more about the criminal nature of this. In the book Crimes of the Educators, Dr. Blumenfeld actually argue that this quackery is a crime against children as well! Handicapping somebody for life with proven quackery ought to be a prosecutable offense.

Very interesting thoughts on the whole word idea that I had never even considered before! Have you written on this anywhere else? You should definitely expand on this. Fascinating thought.

I once had a partner who had taken some basic linguistics in college. She opened my eyes to the power of language, particularly the power to name (was it “spying” or “surveillance” on Trump — let the talking heads tell you what to think!). Orwell stressed this power with his invention of “Newspeak” for Nineteen Eighty-Four, the deliberate limiting of people’s vocabularies to limit what they could think about, like Common Core’s “sight-word”-induced vocabulary collapse.

Chinese pictographs are like that: there may be 54,678 of them, but how many of them can the average person commit to memory? If a person has never encountered one, how do you look it up in a dictionary? How can you sound out a picture which contains no phonetic clues? How do you create an entirely new picture if that’s what it takes to add a concept or discovery to the language? How would people recognize it, or know how to pronounce it if you did? You can have a picture that means “apple” but what do you draw do you say “Granny Smith Apple”? And if a pictograph for “apple” lets you think of an “apple”, how does it help you think *about* an apple in anatomic detail?

Compare the limitations of pictograph writing with the 470,000 English words in existence created out of a mere 26 letters, buttressed with a system of Latin and Greek combining forms which allow any literate person to create entirely new words on demand which other literate people will know how to pronounce and what the word means. Take, for example the made-up word “tachyphrenia” ( I know, it violates the rule about not combining Greek and Latin in one word). It doesn’t take much digging to figure out it would mean “racing mind”, something enough thinkers are afflicted with that we could use a word for it.

My favorite exploration of alphabetic literacy (and its absence) is _The Alphabet Versus the Goddess — The Conflict Between Word and Image_ by Leonard Shlain. Dr. Shlain was a brain surgeon who wrote three seminal books in his spare time, almost as a hobby, spending an average of seven years to research each. ( The others are _Art and Physics_ and _Sex, Time, and Power_.) While on a guided tour of Mediterranean archeological sites, he noticed a pattern of temples dedicated to goddesses which were subsequently re-dedicated to a male god. This made him ask the question, “What does it take to change the sex of God?”

The answer he found was that each of these sex-changes of goddess-to-god was contemporary with the introduction of alphabetic literacy. As a brain surgeon he saw that the act of learning linear, left-brain thinking required for reading in alphabetic literacy was re-wiring the brains of whole societies, shifting their spirituality away from feminine, holistic, right-brain thinking to left brain-dominant male thinking. And this changed the sex of God for societies, every time.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that China will shift, however slowly, from pictographs to the Western alphabet. If it does, is there a living-laboratory opportunity to test Dr. Shlain’s theory? Or will this be thwarted by the fact that China is, at least for now, ruled by an ideology which strenuously demands (like kill-you-and-harvest-your-organs demands) that you have no God at all?

BENDING THE TWIG, The Revolution in Education and its Effect on Our Children, by Augustin G. Rudd, published 1957. Great historical reference, well footnoted.
Unfortunately, Rudd thought shinning a light on the sight reading ‘problem’ would fix it.
Rudolf Flesch got stepped on also.

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